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Clayton Cramer's BLOG |
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Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
 Never forget! I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
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Saturday, February 04, 2006
Burning An Embassy: Isn't That Act Of War? I'm a bit confused by this: DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) - Thousands of Syrians enraged by caricatures of Islam's revered prophet torched the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus on Saturday - the most violent in days of furious protests by Muslims in Asia, Europe and the Middle East.An embassy is considered sovereign territory. Considering that the Syrian government operates a police state, it is clear that this could not have happened without at least the acquiescence of the Syrian government. I believe that Syria has just created a legal basis for invasion by NATO (since both Denmark and Norway are members of NATO). Iraqis rallying by the hundreds demanded an apology from the European Union, and the leader of the Palestinian group Hamas called the cartoons "an unforgivable insult" that merited punishment by death.I'm not going to care much about hundreds of upset Iraqis. We've had months where almost that many Iraqis have blown themselves up in suicide attacks, so it doesn't mean much about how Iraqis feel. But Hamas has just asked itself for a complete cutoff of funds, and justified sending CIA snipers after Hamas leadership. Responding to an insult by what is effectively the secular equivalent of fatwa justifies use of deadly force against Hamas. If Islam wants a fight to the death, it can be arranged. There are a lot of powerful nations that are fighting battles with Islamic extremists right now--and even when the targets of Islamic extremism have contributed to the problem by their actions (as in Chechnya), Islam better wake up to the fact that a war against the U.S., the European Union, Russia, India, the Philipines, Australia, and all of our regional allies, is doomed to failure. China has its own problems with Islamic extremists in its western provinces. While China would almost certainly not join in--it has strong reasons to remain neutral while the rest of the world cleans up the message caused by Arab and Iranian madness. There are other Muslim nations, but once you get back from the Arab states and Iran, the problems are far more subdued--and often tied to funding coming out of the Arab states. UPDATE: Bubbleheads says that the NATO charter excludes attacks outside North America and Europe, so I guess the burning of the embassies doesn't qualify. Friday, February 03, 2006
I Keep Hoping That Liberals Will Figure Out What's At Stake There doesn't seem to be much of a middle ground between freedom and Islam, these days. The most conservative political perspectives in the U.S. are positively giddy ACLU-style liberalism compared to much of Islam. These protest signs from Eurabia (the place that used to be called Europe) should cause liberals to think long and hard: do we really want this bunch to see themselves as the winners in Iraq? Like this sign, "Prepare for the Real Holocaust". Or this sign, "Exterminate those who slander Islam." Look, I don't think it is either polite or sensible to run around insulting other people's religious sensibilities. But there comes a certain moment when Islam is going to have to grow up, and accept that not everyone shares their point of view. If they insist on a war to the death, it will happen. But they will pay the price for insisting on staying in the twelfth century. I wasn't planning to participate in the blogburst of posting these offensive cartoons. But the lunatics persuaded me.  Cooking Eggs With Cell Phones I have the same reaction to this web page as Different River--I'm not sure that I believe it. But if it works, let me know. I might start using an earphone, only: Many students, and other young people, have little in the way of cooking skills but can usually get their hands on a couple of mobile phones. So, this week, we show you how to use two mobile phones to cook an egg which will make a change from phoning out for a pizza. Please note that this will not work with cordless phones. Victoria's Secret & Breastfeeding My brain is about to implode from the irony of this story: COLUMBIA, S.C. -- In a Victoria's Secret store, surrounded by frilly bras and blown-up images of barely covered models, Lori Rueger says she was told to find somewhere else to breast feed.Now, I don't particularly think that the government should be passing laws telling businesses what rules they have for use of the facilities, but I generally think of businesses that tell a mother not to breastfeed as being some sort of repressed, "stuck in the 1950s" sort of conservatives. I guess not! Different River, where I found this news story, refers to it as "display them, don't use them" and filed it under Strange Syllogistic Hypocrisy, which fits it well. Victoria's Secret makes their money by promoting women as sexual objects--specifically their breasts. And what's a common result of women who dress to thrill? Babies. There's nothing wrong with that. There is something wrong with Victoria's Secret being uptight and repressed about breastfeeding. Gun Carrying & Road Rage This article in New Scientist reports on a study from the usual suspects, trying to suggest that concealed carry is a public safety hazard: A survey of 2400 drivers carried out by David Hemenway and his colleagues at the Harvard School of Public Health shows that motorists who carry guns in their cars are far more likely to indulge in road rage - driving aggressively or making obscene gestures - than motorists without guns. Some 23 per cent of gun-toting drivers admitted making rude signs, compared with 16 per cent of those who did not carry guns (Accident Analysis and Prevention, DOI:10.1016/j.aap.2005.12.014).There are so many things wrong with this. Police no longer have the right to ban someone they consider unsuitable from owning a gun.What? I can only think of a very few states where the police can prohibit gun ownership because they consider the person "unsuitable." New York State, for example, gives police broad authority to decide who may get a permit to own a pistol. But this is quite atypical. In most of the U.S., there is almost no discretion about deciding whether someone is "unsuitable" to own a gun. Now, a lot of states used to give police or judges broad, usually unlimited discretion as to who could get a permit to carry a gun, but that's not the same thing. I can't tell whether the ignorance here is on the part of the reporter, or "researcher Mary Vriniotis." The next question is: If, as this report suggests, people who carry guns are exceptionally likely to act aggressively while driving, and this has some relevance to those Americans who have concealed handgun licenses, where are the vast swarm of "road rage" shootings by concealed handgun licensees? There have been a few--a very few--and by that I mean that I don't have to take my shoes off to count such incidents over the last ten years. The number of such incidents is so small that it suggests that either: 1. Gun carrying as a predictor of likelihood of road rage turning into a criminal use of a gun is not terribly important. 2. Gun carrying, as measured by this study, includes a lot of people who do not (and probably cannot) get concealed handgun permits. John Lott observes: There is not attempt to differentiate whether the person who had the gun in the car had it legally or not. No attempt to determine whether they had a gun when the rage occurred. While one regression with a few very basic variables was apparently run (but not shown), no explanation was offered for why such a limited set of control variables were used (e.g., why not trouble with law enforcement, education, income, smoker, race). Trouble with law enforcement (past arrests) would have been obvious (though it would have been even better if they had asked whether the person had convictions for felonies (I wonder why they didn't include that question)).Dr. Lott is also upset that Hemenway, one of the researchers, has been reluctant to release the data set so that other researchers can play with it. This is important because: 1. It allows independent verification of the raw data and the results that have been published. 2. It allows for further investigation of other characteristics of the road rage population--which might tell us that they have some other characteristic that might even be more important. (Yeah, it would be amusing to see someone use that data set to demonstrate that public safety will be enhanced by taking drivers licenses from liberals.) Dr. Lott has always made his data sets available to other researchers. Gun control advocates have a long history of withholding data sets on which their published research depends. Why do you suppose that is? It doesn't give me much confidence that they even believe their own claims. If a historian published a paper that made digested claims about something--and wasn't prepared to make either the database or a complete list of sources available from which that database came--it would quickly lead to suspicion of fraud. In fact, that's part of what happened with Michael Bellesiles. Professor Lindgren was surprised by Bellesiles's probate inventory claims, and asked for a copy of the database--which magically disappeared. The Greatest Threat to Marriage... Unfortunately, it isn't same-sex marriage. It is the collapse of straight marriage over the last forty years. When I was growing up, divorce was really, really uncommon. I wish that I could say that it was because almost everyone that got married stayed in love, but that wasn't the reason. Divorce was not terribly easy to get. In some states, you had to prove adultery (which is the only valid reason that the New Testament recognizes)--and to prove this, private detectives would arrange to photograph whichever spouse was prepared to play the adulterous partner with someone else in incriminating positions. This was dishonest--worse, it required people to perjure themselves in court. Divorce was also expensive. Even if both parties wanted out, you needed lawyers. I don't know what the average cost was back then, but it certainly was typical to spend thousands of dollars--back when $1000 was a lot more money than it is now. California, as with many bad ideas, led the way. The Family Law Act of 1969 (signed by Governor Reagan, who knew a bit about divorce himself) made divorce into a "no-fault" action. Within a few years of this law taking effect, what had been exceptional--a divorced person--became common. It also spread to the rest of the country, and now every state has some form of this bad idea. I say, "bad idea" because while the old system made people perjure themselves, and enriched lawyers, "no-fault" divorce has had its own set of problems. I've seen a lot of marriages fail over the 26 years that my wife and I have been married. There have been some that I really can't see an argument for saving. But I've seen a lot more marriages fail because divorce was easier than trying to solve the problems that individuals brought to the marriage, or to work out their joint difficulties. What are some of those problems? A disturbing number of these individual problems were child sexual abuse. Perhaps it was being in California, but I've lost count of the number of victims that I have known. I hope that it isn't a surprise, but children who are sexually abused often have serious problems as adults: with substance abuse; with responsibility; with having healthy sexual relations with a spouse. At least one marriage that I know of broke up because the wife had been sexually abused as a child. She eventually left because she decided that she could only be comfortable having sex with women. (This should be no surprise.) I knew another couple where the husband had been molested as a child, as well as physically abused by his alcoholic father. He never really grew up, emotionally, and was a lousy provider. His wife had grown up in an emotionally abusive home. That marriage broke up after almost twenty years of suffering. More commonly, the problem that I have seen destroying marriage is selfishness, often expressed in an irrational materialism. A successful marriage requires an enormous willingness to compromise. Some guys use the Bible as an excuse to tell their wife what to do, and are careful to quote very selectively to achieve that position. In non-religious homes, men like this find other justifications for domestic tyranny. One side effect of feminism has been full equality on the domestic tyranny front. It is less common, but I have seen marriages where the wife ends up as the domestic tyrant. More commonly, the wife gets back at her husband's selfishness with out of control spending. The net effect is a house full of expensive stuff--and two people that are working too many hours to pay the bills. That gets old quickly, and the anger of working too hard leads to depression, and then to divorce. There are a lot of marriages like this--and they don't last. Easy divorce means that it is easier to walk out, and start over (often repeating the mistakes that destroyed the first marriage), then it is to ask, "What's gone wrong here? What can we do to overcome these problems?" One upon a time, evangelical Christians had much lower divorce rates than the general population. Yet this is no longer the case: Although many Christian churches attempt to dissuade congregants from getting a divorce, the research confirmed a finding identified by Barna a decade ago (and further confirmed through tracking studies conducted each year since): born again Christians have the same likelihood of divorce as do non-Christians.One of the problems is economic--there is enormous pressure on mothers of small children to be out working. But that's only part of the problem, and I suspect this is often a symptom of the selfishness problem. We need to confront the fact that divorce is somewhat infectious. When one person in a social circle gets divorced, it makes it easier for someone else who is unhappy to think of divorce (instead of looking for assistance in repairing the marriage). We also need to confront the increasing unwillingness of churches to say, "This is not okay." When my wife and I were married, in 1980, even in California, most churches would not have allowed a divorced person to have any sort of leadership role. The book of 1 Timothy is clear that those in leadership positions were to be "husbands of one wife." Leadership necessarily becomes an example. If you don't want people to regard divorce as an acceptable solution to what are usually repairable problems, then putting divorced people in leadership is unwise. By the time we left California, a church that had stuck to a rule like this would simply cease to exist. We knew a few other people in most churches we attended who were not divorced, but we were very much the exceptions: the last trees in a forest full of stumps. Rigidity about rules is legalism, but abandoning all rules because it makes some people uncomfortable is destructive in its own way. Widespread acceptance of divorce with Christian churches has taken away one relatively small disincentive to divorce. There is, I think, a legitimate distinction between the spouse who initiates the divorce, and the one who does not. There are a surprising number of divorces that seem to come out of nowhere--where a guy or a gal wakes up one morning and out of the blue decides that they are going to leave. I see the pain of the ones who get dumped, and it grieves me. Sometimes, yes, you can see that they were clueless and obnoxious--but often as not, I see good and decent people wondering, "Where did that come from?" I do think that same-sex marriage needs to be stopped. But I also think that we need to look seriously at why straight marriage is in serious trouble. Some of it is that no-fault divorce has made it too easy to leave. But the bigger problem is a culture built on selfishness, not on compromise and concern for one's spouse. Alternative Energy Sources I found a link over at Professor Bainbridge's blog about this company that is supposedly doing trials on producing biodiesel from carbon dioxide and algae: Isaac Berzin has developed a method of capturing CO2 from smokestack emissions using algae, and turning the result into biofuels including biodiesel, ethanol, and even a bio-coal substitute. His process, based on technology he developed for NASA in the late 1990s, captures more than 40% of emitted CO2 (on sunny days, up to 80%) along with over 80% of NOx emissions; in turn, it produces biodiesel at rates-per-acre that could make a full conversion to biofuel for transportation readily achievable. Berzin's company, Greenfuel, has multiple test installations underway, and expects to have a full-scale plant up and running by 2008 or 2009.This web site, being environmentalist, of course, has to find a problem with this--even if it works: So what are the drawbacks?Groan. "The perfect is the enemy of the good." Idaho Marriage Amendment Out of Committee I mentioned that I went and testified in favor of, if not the particular text in question, some sort of amendment to the Idaho Constitution to remove authority to define from judicial abuse. The committee voted 13-4 in favor of sending the bill to the floor: While opponents say the measure's not necessary because state law already defines marriage as being between a man and a woman, supporters say the amendment would prevent judges from overturning that law.Bryan Fischer, who is one of the forces behind this amendment, points out that several people who testified against the bill described themselves as gay people in long-term relationships--35 years in one case. This suggests that legal recognition isn't necessary for gay people to remain committed. There are gay people who are in long-term committed relationships. These seem to be more common among lesbians than gay men, but they do exist. And they exist in spite of no legal recognition. I find the claims that some people make that gay marriage will make these relationships more stable rather bizarre. I know straight couples that have been together, without any paper, for decades. I know, unfortunately, far too many straight couples for whom a marriage license simply added one more obstacle to their breakup. He Obviously Saw Brokeback Mountain One Too Many Times I try really, really hard to take seriously the claim that homosexuals are just like the rest of us: they want to settle down, get married, buy the house with the white picket fence, etc. And then you see news stories like this, about a guy who is presumably pretty well off financially from what he does for a living, should have no problem finding a long-term sexual partner, and you ask yourself, "Oh yeah?" New Zealand filmmaker Lee Tamahori, who directed the James Bond movie "Die Another Day," has been arrested in a Hollywood prostitution sting while dressed in drag.For those of you not from Los Angeles: Santa Monica Blvd. in Hollywood is the gay prostitution street. (Hollywood Blvd. is the straight prostitution street.) Now, some of you are going to say, "Clayton's picking on one weird case." Sorry, but there's plenty of examples of the depravity of the entertainment industry out there. Like this charming gem from Doe v. Capital Cities et al., 50 Cal. App. 4th 1038 (1996): An aspiring actor is first drugged and then gang-raped by a casting director and four other men one Sunday at the casting director's home. Can the actor successfully allege causes of action for sexual harassment and negligent hiring against the casting director's employers? The trial court ruled against the actor, sustaining a demurrer without leave to amend. On this appeal, we analyze the allegations in the actor's second amended complaint in light of pertinent statutory and decisional law and conclude that he has adequately pled a cause of action for sexual harassment but that the allegations for negligent hiring are insufficient as a matter of law.By the way, a footnote identifies who these rapists are: Those four individuals are Barry Parker, Michael Sullivan, Ken Dickson, and Fred Goss.Some of these are pretty common names, so Google doesn't help much. There is a Fred Goss in the entertainment business, and his web page talks about "Goss, along with his partner, Nick Holly..." as does this page. There is also a columnist named Fred Goss who writes opera reviews for The Advocate (a gay newspaper). I don't know if these are the same guy. It seems most unlikely that one or the other of these self-identified gay men named Fred Goss isn't the rapist named in this lawsuit. It seems extremely unlikely that there are three gay men all named Fred Goss in the entertainment and arts business. I guess drugging and raping someone isn't a big issue in some circles. Certainly, molesting children isn't a big problem in Hollywood. To quote from this glowing account of director Victor Salva: Perhaps Hollywood's most unsung auteur, Victor Salva's career has been one of moderate commercial success flooded with controversy. To some, he's a competent B-filmmaker with an eye for precision. To others, he's a brilliant thinking-man's Spielberg with an eye for jaded lead characters and some fantastic directorial flourishes. Nevertheless, Salva has brought an almost Hemingway-like approach to his films, films that recall the visual display of Spielberg with characters that recall the rough masculinity of classic Howard Hawks. Thursday, February 02, 2006
Do We Have To Take Hostages & Behead Them? Can you believe that NBC would be this insensitive? NEW YORK — Britney Spears will guest star on an episode of "Will & Grace," NBC announced Tuesday.Oh, whoops, something got a little scrambled. Here's the actual news story: NEW YORK — Britney Spears will guest star on an episode of "Will & Grace," NBC announced Tuesday.Now, as you might well expect, some groups, like Don Wildmon's American Family Association, are hopping mad: To further denigrate Christianity, NBC chose to air it the night before Good Friday.Michelle Malkin reports on the unwillingness of American newspapers to show their solidarity with Danish print media that published cartoons that, understandably, offended Muslims. Does anyone think that NBC would even briefly entertain a program that was openly disrespectful of Islam, or that could be interpreted by at least some devout Muslims as disrespectful? Of course not. But that's because Christians don't take hostages, cut off their heads, and videotape it for the world to see. I think that everyone needs to be a little thicker skinned. But I do think it is disgraceful that the American media are prepared to engage in nasty little insults to the majority religion of this country--while being oh so careful not to offend Islam. Marriage Amendment (Idaho) I took the day off work, partly to go and testify before a legislative committee about a proposed marriage amendment, and partly to get a bit more chopping done on my next book. Finding parking there was not as easy as I would have expected--the parking meters are short duration, and unless you have exact change, or a residential parking permit, you won't be able to find parking within six blocks of the statehouse. My remarks are below. Statement Concerning a Marriage Amendment February 2, 2006 My name is Clayton Cramer. I live in Boise. I moved here from the San Francicsco Bay Area in 2001. I am sure that all of you have heard the claim that banning same-sex marriage—as this proposed amendment will effectively do—is like the laws that used to ban interracial marriage. It is a very seductive analogy, but wrong in a number of ways. First, unlike the definition of marriage as a man and a woman, bans on interracial marriage were not part of the Christian tradition. Maryland was, to my knowledge, the first adopter of such laws in 1664.[Archives of Maryland, 1:533-4.] Such laws were never universal in the United States. In 1910, at the heights of Social Darwinism (which put enormous emphasis on racial difference), only 28 out of the 46 states had such laws.[Gabriel J. Chin and Hrishi Karthikeyan, "Preserving Racial Identity: Population Patterns and the Application of Anti-Miscegenation Statutes to Asian Americans, 1910-1950," Berkeley Asian Law Journal, 9:1 [2002], 14.] By contrast, I am unaware of any society, anywhere, until the last few years, that has recognized same-sex marriages—or even considered it. Even Greece and Rome, which tolerated homosexuality (although a rather different form than is common today), did not solemnize same-sex marriage. If there is any analogy here, it is that both same-sex marriage and Maryland's ban on interracial marriage were both new ideas, contrary to many centuries of Western tradition. Second, the analogy that others make to the Virginia law struck down in the historic U.S. Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia (1967) is wrong because Virginia did not simply refuse to recognize the District of Columbia marriage of an interracial couple. Virginia sentenced them to one year in jail—suspended if they agreed to leave Virginia for at least 25 years.[Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1, 4 (1967).] There is no similarity to the situation today. If a same-sex couple decides to drive to Massachusetts, get married, and drive back to Idaho, no one is going to arrest them. No one is going to prosecute them. Idaho law is going to simply ignore them. I am not completely happy with the proposed amendment. I would prefer that we not define marriage in the state constitution, which limits the authority of the legislature to make future adjustments or corrections to our laws. I would prefer instead that the constitution limit the authority of the judiciary to alter the definition. It is the right of the people, or their elected legislators, to write laws defining marriage—not the judges. There are some people here in Idaho who would like the state to recognize same-sex marriages. The ACLU's national director, Nadine Stroessen, at Yale in January of 2005, stated that it will sue to impose not only same-sex marriage on the states, but also polygamy.[Crystal Paul-Laughinghouse, “Leader of ACLU talks on agenda,” Yale Daily News, January 19, 2005, http://yaledailynews.com/article.asp?AID=27865, last accessed February 1, 2006.] This shouldn't be a surprise; any argument for same-sex marriage applies at least as well to such time honored practices as polygamy. Amending the state constitution is necessary because, unfortunately, judges in a few other states have shown a willingness to redefine marriage as suits their whims. Please make sure that the power to define marriage stays where it belongs—with the people and their legislators. Labels: homosexuality, polygamy Wednesday, February 01, 2006
Disturbing Poll Numbers If this news account were complete and accurate, it would be a strong argument for rapid withdrawal from Iraq: BAGHDAD, Jan. 31 (UPI) -- A new poll finds that most Iraqis think the United States plans to maintain permanent bases in Iraq and almost half approve of attacks on U.S. forces.On the other hand, here's some more information about the poll results that didn't get into my local newspaper (for some odd reason): At the same time, the poll found that many Iraqis think that some outside military forces are required to keep Iraq stable until the new government can field adequate security forces on its own. Only 39 percent of Iraqis surveyed thought that Iraqi police and army forces were strong enough to deal with the security challenges on their own, while 59 percent thought Iraq still needed the help of military forces from other countries.So a clear majority want a timetable for withdrawal--but taking as much as two years to do so. This is a bit more complex of a statement than the first news report, isn't it? The UPI report about the poll is even a bit better nuanced: Such gaps between reality and expectation occur repeatedly in the poll. While 87 percent of Iraqis say they would approve of their government endorsing a timeline for the U.S. withdrawal, they are divided evenly over whether it should occur in six months or gradually over the space of two years. Pollack believes that Iraqis are prioritizing their fears, balancing their concerns over possible civil war with their innate dislike of a foreign occupier. "They recognize that their institutions of security and politics are not ready to function," he said. What Causes Liberalism? Michelle Malkin calls it a lie when Senator Kerry's claimed that only 53% of high school students graduate--when the actual percentage is just under 84%. I'm more inclined to believe that Senator Kerry actually believes this--and this explains his liberalism. Ignorance causes all sorts of strange ideas--which may be why liberalism is more common among college students (who are still learning a lot, both academically and in the real world). Mental Illness I've mentioned before that my next book (after I get the current one put to bed) is going to be about deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, and the havoc that it has inflicted both on the larger society, and the mentally ill. This latest workplace killing seems to fit the model pretty well. From these news accounts, in 1950, or even in 1965, the killer would have been hospitalized for her own safety--and as a nice side effect, seven people who are now dead would almost certainly be alive: DeGasperin told reporters Tuesday that Sanmarco had left the mail facility on a medical leave in 2003 after her co-workers expressed concerns she might hurt herself. He said police removed her from the building one time. Labels: deinstitutionalization An Apt Description of San Francisco I mentioned yesterday the bizarre expressions of political rage that are common in the Bay Area, and how they suggest to me not so much political differences as severe emotional problems. A reader who recently had to take care of some family business in the Open Ward (as some parts of the Bay Area are quite appropriately known) wandered by the March for Life parade, and noticed the bizarreness of the counterdemonstrators: Trotskyites; Maoists; Stalinists. He observed that San Franciso is "a museum of philosophical errors of the last two hundred years." Yup! Middle Eastern Oil Dependence I missed Bush's State of the Union speech last night. It was my wife's birthday, and we were off having a romantic evening--that always takes precedence over a formal speech. I see that Bush is again saying that we need to do something about our dependence on oil from unstable parts of the world. I suspect that almost everyone would agree--but how to reduce that dependence, and more importantly, why? Why? The why has one obvious reason: We don't want our economy sabotaged by war, sanctions against Iran, or a shutting off of oil by Muslim nations as some sort of punishment for preventing Holocaust II. There's a second, more subtle reason, however, to disengage ourselves from that part of the world--but it isn't going to work unless we can get most other industrialized nations to join us: starving Islamofascism. As long as Iran and the Arab nations have money coming in from the rest of the world, there will be money going to fund groups like al-Qaeda. There will also be the more subtle forms of Islamofascism, such as the Saudi governments subsidies to its brand of fundamentalist Islam around the world. This isn't as directly dangerous as al-Qaeda, but there is a dangerous synergy because the two. If I could have one wish fulfilled right now, it would be for someone to get fusion electricity production operational. Cheap electricity would, in a decade or two, make oil irrelevant. The Arab nations would go back to being Bedouins--and we could turn that part of the world into a giant nature preserve, as a reminder of what happens when you get stuck in the twelfth century, and refuse to move forward. How? Bush has talked about hydrogen cars in the past. I still think this is wishful thinking, because the energy required to electrolyze hydrogen out of water is substantial. Alcohol from grain and other renewable resources, as Bush talked about last night, makes more sense. It is true that alcohol from corn is still quite expensive compared to oil--but there is a plausible argument that we should tax oil imported from "unstable" regions. We could call it a "military preparedness tax" or perhaps a, "lunatics with oil money are dangerous tax." Such a tax would certainly raise oil prices a bit, and perhaps enough to make alcohol a feasible alternative. It doesn't make sense to tax all imported oil. Norway isn't a threat to us. Canada isn't a threat to us. Mexico is only a threat to us if the nation gets so poor that they have to send half their population north for work. Any tax on imported oil needs to clearly discourage imports from places where lunatics are in charge, or have ready access to that money. We obviously can't discriminate based on the dominant religion (even though that is the basis), but perhaps based on whether women are allowed to vote, and whether they hold fair and open elections. Iraq, Turkey, and Indonesia are about the only Islamic nations from whom we could import oil under such a rule. Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Some Insights Into Iran's Plans This news report indicates that Iran has obtained what is described as an "illicit" document about how to make nuclear weapons: VIENNA, Austria (AP) - A document obtained by Iran on the nuclear black market serves no other purpose than to make an atomic bomb, the International Atomic Energy Agency said Tuesday.I'm scratching my head about this. That U-235 bombs use two hemispheres is not exactly news. These are a very simple technology (unlike plutonium bombs, which require a somewhat more sophisticated approach). You just slam the two hemispheres together at very high speed, so that you get supercriticality. If you bring the hemispheres together too slowly (say, in 1/5 of a second) you don't get much of a bang--more like a fizzle, with perhaps some light, heat, and radiation, but not enough to justify the investment in making such a device. What has been worrying me for some time about Iranian intentions is that U-235 bombs are quite seriously limited in their yield. Let me explain. There is a certain minimum mass of either U-235 or Pu-239 required for a nuclear explosion. This source says 20-25 kg for U-235 in a gun-style assembly; I don't think that I quite believe that it is that high. If you put a bit less than that mass together, the spontaneous fissioning of either U-235 or Pu-239 hits enough other atoms to cause a chain reaction. It may not explode, but it will become a self-sustaining reaction that will produce a lot of radiation. One of the scientists who worked at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project accidentally caused a similar type of accident. There was no explosion, but he died of radiation poisoning. This minimum mass issue means that there is an upper limit to a U-235 bomb (unless you go for the much more complex implosion scheme used for plutonium bombs). I don't know what that upper limit of that yield is, but I suspect that it is in the tens of kilotons range--not the hundreds of kilotons range. This is why, if you plan to make the sort of bombs that will useful against hardened targets (like missile silos, or underground bunkers), you don't build U-235 bombs. You build bombs using plutonium. This tells me that Iran is planning to build relatively tiny atomic bombs. What for? As battlefield nukes, they make some sense. They don't make a lot of sense against hardened military targets. They make some sense against cities, as long as you are prepared to throw a lot of them--and you aren't worried about what is called fratricide. That is, if you set off nuclear bomb A too close to nuclear bomb B, the radiation dose will prematurely set off the chain reaction in one or both of bomb B's hemispheres. You may still get an explosion out of it, but it will likely be a fizzle, not a full yield explosion. Here's my critical concern: these relatively small yield U-235 bombs make lots of sense for terrorists. Why? Because they won't be terribly large in weight or dimensions, and they are dead simple. The U-235 bomb was so simple that there was no need to test the design before using it on Hiroshima; Fat Man, a plutonium implosion device, was more uncertain, and that is what was tested at Alamogordo. Compare the size of Little Boy (the U-235 bomb dropped on Hiroshima) and Fat Man (the Pu-239 bomb dropped on Nagasaki). Little Boy was less than half the diameter of Fat Man. If you were a terrorist, and wanted to smuggle nuclear weapons into say, Baltimore, you would want the smallest physical device that you could get. Remember, a terrorist does not need to completely destroy an American city to accomplish his ends. Even a 20 kiloton bomb going off in an American city would cause political and economic devastation far worse than what happened on 9/11. Moonbats I try very hard not to lose perspective on political opponents. There are legitimate questions that liberals raise: What are the proper limits of governmental power with respect to U.S. citizens apparently engaged in terrorist acts? Where is the line that separates necessary but unpleasant interrogation techniques from actions that demean us as a nation? Even on the economic questions, I am a bit more sympathetic than I used to be: What steps should the government take to encourage or assist in providing health insurance for the working poor? The Soviet Union was far too willing to declare anyone that disagreed with it to be "mentally ill." You can disagree with me without being crazy. In my experience, many political differences reflect the diversity of experiences that all of us bring to the table. On the other hand, there are factions of the left that, even if they don't meet any clinical definition of mental illness, exhibit behaviors that look more like psychological problems than political opinions. I mentioned the photographs that Zombietime keeps gathering of Bay Area political protests. As much as some of you in Middle America want to believe that these kooks are either the result of clever use of PhotoShop--they aren't. The Bay Area is awash in kooks like this. A&E's Flight 93 I saw the last 25 minutes of this evening, and I was overpowered by it that I stayed up to watch it when they ran it against 11:00 PM. My son, who is old enough to remember 9/11, stayed up with me. It isn't a documentary, but a dramatic re-creation that faithfully followed the well-documented events of that day. There are stories so powerful that it would be difficult to screw them up. There's no need to make a story like this maudlin--the human tragedy of that day, and the courage of the passengers and crew who fought back speaks for itself. This film is something that doesn't have to do anything but present what happened, the way it happened, to put a lump in your throat and tears on your cheeks. I didn't recognize any of the actors in this film. The Middle Easterners who played the hijackers managed to convey menace at the start, but by the end, as one of them tries to stop the rest, he manages to convey the confusion that I suspect that the real musclemen on these flights may have felt. Bin Laden acknowledged some months later that not all of the hijackers knew that these were suicide missions. They were prepared to die, certainly, but may not have known that it was a certainty. Only the pilots knew this. If the conjectures are correct--that the musclemen were told to just keep the passengers under control, and were not aware of how the flights were going to end--then the passengers on United Airlines 93, once they were aware of the crashes, had an informational advantage over some of the hijackers. I can see why the musclemen would have wondered, "Why are these passengers prepared to risk getting killed?" Well worth watching. It is a shame that it won't be a theatrical release. A lot of people need to be reminded of the montrousness of what happened that day. It will be run again. The schedule: Tuesday, Jan. 31 1:00am Flight 93. 10:00pm Flight 93. Wednesday, Feb. 1 2:00am Flight 93. 9:00pm Flight 93. Thursday, Feb. 2 1:00am Flight 93. UPDATE: I am not the only person to watch this and be powerfully affected by it: It's now 2:53 am, and I just got finished watching United Flight 93 on A&E.And this person: I sat here crying my eyes out. I would suggest to anyone to see this movie to see what all of these people went through.This person couldn't finish it: Watching that movie, those first twenty minutes, I relieved that morning all over again, and much to my surprise? dismay? expectation? The wounds were every bit still as raw, it hurt just as much to watch it, to relive it. There was a knot in my throat, and my pulse raced. To the point that I had to turn it off.And this one: The phone calls from the heroes on the plane & the conversations that they had while the plane was still in the air were (I can only assume) real & I guess it all got me thinking. Thinking about 9/11, thinking about what I would do in a similar situation. The movie got to me - I cried all the way through it. I think I was so affected by it because I wasn't concentrating so much on the movie as on my own remembrances of that day.Now, there are some intellectuals out there prepared to claim that Bush was behind it, or the Mossad, or that the Mossad knew about it in advance and didn't warn us. But the evidence is so overwhelming on this, and the irrationality expressed by people like this just reminds us that what causes Holocaust denial isn't so different from other forms of putting your fingers in your ears and yelling, "I can't hear you!" Monday, January 30, 2006
Google's Censorship: Bug, Feature, or Hole? I mentioned that some bloggers have noticed that the Chinese version of Google was dramatically different for the search string "jesus christ" than the standard version of Google. Jacob Williams noticed something that might be a bug, or it might be a hole in the censorship: I tested some of my own searches and ended up doing a search for the word “gospel”. The first listing on the english language US site was for gospelcom.net, which seems to be appropriate. I did the same search for “gospel” on google.cn and got different results and no sign of the gospelcom.net page. I did a site search for gospelcom.net on google.cn and got nothing at all. The site did not seem to be indexed at all in the chinese version of google. Upon further testing I found that the site search had an extra parameter of “meta=countryCN”. This was the default when I first did the search. However after changing that parameter to have the value “countryUS”, I received the full site listing for gospelcom.net. Now (probably due to a cookie value, I’ll test some more) I receive the full results when I search from the search box on the top of a google.cn page. And, now when I search for gospel on google.cn gospelcom.net is the first result.If this is a hole in Google's censorship scheme, it is going to last for about a week, and then someone in China is going to pass the word around--and Google will be told to make it work better (or worse, depending on your point of view). Multiculturalism vs. Freedom of the Press I am pleased that the Danish government isn't kowtowing to threats. I am not surprised that a Danish corporation is: BEIRUT, Lebanon - The controversy over Danish caricatures of Prophet Muhammad escalated Monday as gunmen seized an EU office in Gaza and Muslims appealed for a trade boycott of Danish products. Denmark called for its citizens in the Middle East to exercise vigilance.The Danish government has had the good sense to observe that this is a freedom of the press issue. Arla, not surprisingly, is looking at the bottom line. When Jefferson observed that, Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.He was describing this problem--financial interest is the reason that a corporation exists, and unless those who run the corporation are remarkable people, they will look out for economic interest, not human rights. Somehow, I Doubt That Schroeder Would Have Been This Direct Angela Merkel laid it on the line in Ramallah: no financial support for the Palestinian National Authority unless Hamas recognizes Israel, abandons terrorism, and accepts the existing components of the Near East peace process: Sie könne sich nicht vorstellen, sagte Merkel am Nachmittag in Ramallah, dass die Bundesregierung eine Palästinensische Autonomiebehörde finanziell unterstützt, die nicht die folgenden drei Bedingungen erfüllt: Anerkennung Israels, Abkehr von der Gewalt und Akzeptierung aller bisherigen Vereinbarungen im Nahost-Friedensprozess. Another Source of Greenhouse Gases An article in the January 12, 2006 issue of Nature reports that plants are producing large quantities of methane--an important greenhouse gas--and this is a surprise: The newly revealed methane emissions have taken plant physiologists by surprise, because far more energy is required to create methane than, say, carbon dioxide in an oxygenated environment. Climate researchers are also amazed that they could have missed what is potentially a huge methane source — up to a third of all methane produced worldwide (see 'How could we have missed this?').This methane production appears to increase as temperatures rise, up to 70 degrees Celsius. As I have said in the past, there's a lot more uncertainty about the causes of global warming than a lot of environmental activists are willing to admit. Perhaps we need to start paving over more of the world's land area. (I'm joking, of course.) Labels: global warming Why The Left Is On The Palestinian Side In the last few years, leftists across the Western world have taken the Palestinian side--for reasons that elude me. But here's more reasons, I guess, for the left to side with the Palestinians: JERUSALEM -- The incoming Hamas government will move quickly to make Islamic sharia "a source" of law in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and will overhaul the Palestinian education system to separate boys and girls and introduce a more Islamic curriculum, a senior official in the movement said yesterday.Now, the article goes on to emphasize that they won't be going to the extremes of Iran and Saudi Arabia, but still: He made it clear that one way Hamas planned to encourage the next generation to follow sharia was to revamp the Palestinian education system, separating girls' and boys' classes and introducing a more Islamic curriculum.I rather doubt that co-education is what causes high suicide rates. Global Warming From Fairbanks, Alaska: If the next four days are as unrelentingly cold as the past week, January 2006 may claim the bronze--third place overall--as the coldest month on record since 1971, reports the scientific crew over at the National Weather Service Fairbanks station.And in Georgia (former Soviet Union): Russia restored gas supplies to neighbouring Georgia yesterday, a move that did little to end a week of enmity after an explosion ripped through a vital Russian pipeline, crippling the Caucasian state's energy system during a record cold snap. Labels: global warming Cindy Sheehan Discusses Run Against Senator Feinstein (D-CA) Yeah, that Senator Feinstein is a right-wing defender of President Bush! CARACAS, Venezuela Jan 29, 2006 — Cindy Sheehan, the peace activist who set up camp near President Bush's Texas ranch last summer, said Saturday she is considering running against Sen. Dianne Feinstein to protest what she called the California lawmaker's support for the war in Iraq.One of the reasons that the left keeps losing--in spite of Bush's mistakes and pandering to the Big Government crowd--is that the left simply hasn't a clue what average Americans think. I suspect that Feinstein's grudging support of Bush's Iraq War policy is at least partly because she knows that this is not a game. We either fight and kill Islamofascists in Iraq, or we'll be fighting and killing them in Marin County. The left, fortunately for Bush, is so enraged that they don't realize the outside the multimillionaire wine and cheese party set, even most Californians don't buy in Sheehan's "America is evil" mentality. I have a lot of differences with Senator Feinstein. It is difficult for me to get too heart-broken about the prospect of Cindy Sheehan forcing Feinstein to defend her position in the Democratic primary. The Idea We Dare Not Speak Some ideas are just too depraved to express, it seems: Stating that “homosexual behaviour endangers the survival of humanity” and that “heterosexuality is morally superior to homosexuality” can cost you dearly in France. Exactly these opinions, expressed by the French politician Christian Vanneste last year, led to him being sentenced on Tuesday to payment of a heavy fine. Sunday, January 29, 2006
Noblesse Oblige I see that some other Idaho bloggers are whining about my not having linked to them. Ordinarily, members of the blogospheric nobility do not deign to pay attention to the blogosphere's rabble, but since there are actually bloggers who envy my pitiful readership, I suppose that it is time to show our magnanimous spirit, and add some Idaho bloggers to our blogroll. If you are an Idaho blogger, let me demonstrate my decency and moral superiority to you by adding you to my Idaho bloggers blogroll. (Yeah, it's down at the left side of the page.) If You Live in the Boise Area... A reader is an NRA instructor, and teaches this class which meets the training requirement that Ada County Sheriff's Department has for concealed handgun licensing, and meets the requirements for a number of other states: NRA Personal Protection Handgun Course |
